10 Jan
2012
10 Jan
'12
3:47 p.m.
On Jan 10, 2012, at 10:15 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, yes, NetInfo (on the Mac and I guess NeXT?) was possibly worse than the registry.
Thankfully, it's gone away now.
I guess I don't end up being as worried about privileges as I am about exploitable
code. Privileges are a good second barrier to further damage, but minimizing the surface
area for attacks is still the most important thing. After all, anyone exploiting a remote
hole on a program running on any operating system of note (that has a networking stack)
could easily open up a listen port and start acting as an SMTP relay; that doesn't
require privileges (and in fact, the built-in mini-firewall on Win7 will pop up a warning
that your program has suddenly started sending packets and did you want those walled
off?).
But yes, the privilege model is too permissive. I found it amusing that they finally
caught up with the rest of the world in requiring programs which wanted administrative
rights to basically sudo (something that Unix has had forever and OS X has done from its
public release), but had to back it off in the face of overwhelming user complaints due to
sloppily-written software that assumed too much.
In short, I think the problems with Windows can be laid much more often at the feet of
third-party developers than at those of Microsoft (at least these days, anyway).
- Dave
- The registry
is just abuse. Yes, we could debate endlessly about how bad text files are in comparison.
No, it's not going to change my mind.
Some kind of distributed network-aware database of text files...? :?) Now, of
course, if you want to talk security, they've still got things to answer for. But the
security threats for other major systems are beginning to approach those for Windows these
days, and I'm not certain that a lot of the remaining difference can't be
explained by the larger installed base and thus target value of Windows.
That is the one argument I am still not convinced about, frankly. Even
in Vista & 7, I think the Windows user privileges model has been
comprehensively screwed over and broken by the marketing dept in their
pursuit of something "easy" and "friendly".